If the food industry had a trending list, the emerging national trend brand Genki Forest would undoubtedly rank at the top. During the 2019 Double 11 shopping festival, Genki Forest ranked second in online sales nationwide, beating out Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. In 2020, during the 618 shopping carnival, Genki Forest once again defeated the two giants to retain the Tmall beverage category crown. In just the first half of 2020, sales exceeded 800 million bottles, and over four years, cumulative sales surpassed 1 billion bottles, reaching one-tenth of Coca-Cola's decades-long sales volume in China. In July of this year, its valuation reached 14 billion yuan, close to that of Heytea. With Coca-Cola and Pepsi ahead, and Master Kong, Nongfu Spring, Wahaha, and Uni-President behind, how did Genki Forest, founded only four years ago, stand out in the nearly saturated packaged beverage market and become the new favorite among young consumers?
-01- Packaging is advertising; packaging design must have shelf thinking
Whether a product tastes good and is healthy are the most concerned topics in the food and beverage industry, but these may not be the primary issues for consumers when choosing among numerous beverage products!
In a beverage market prone to impulse purchases, eye-catching packaging undoubtedly plays a key role in random or impulsive consumption.
In the countless beverage market, packaging and product are integrated; product packaging is the company's biggest self-media, and it is the strategic focus and decisive point for beverage brands. The essence of packaging design is to gain visual advantage on the shelf, using color and symbols to suppress competitors and thus gain priority selection.
When all liquor brands use red and yellow as their primary colors, Yanghe Distillery stood out with blue tones, becoming the "Blue Classic" in consumers' eyes, and its market value once surpassed Moutai.
Many people complain that Wanglaoji's red can packaging is tacky, but no one can deny that Wanglaoji's bright red is deeper and more eye-catching than Coca-Cola's canned red.**
To occupy a place in consumers' minds, vision is the first entry point to seize their attention.
Mastering visual elements is mastering an important element of competitive strategy, or even the competitive strategy itself. As a new brand founded in 2016, how did Genki Forest accurately grasp people's visual points from the very beginning?
1. Create exclusive fonts to amplify brand symbols
While other beverages need to place brand names, product names, logos, and other elements on limited packaging space, Genki Forest directly prints the large characters "気" and "燃" on the bottle packaging, symbolizing them, making them so prominent that they cannot be ignored.
The Japanese-style font also leads many consumers to believe that Genki Forest is an imported beverage, subtly enhancing the brand's momentum.
2. Unignorable visually compelling colors
While making fonts eye-catching, Genki Forest's use of visual colors further amplifies its visual compulsion.**
Many packaging designs are now completed in offices without observing the frontline on store shelves, which leads to: beautiful packaging is common, but eye-catching designs are rare.
Using only artistic thinking to design product packaging, ignoring competitive shelf thinking, results in products being drowned in the "ocean" of shelves.
When other beverage brands mostly use colorful systems like red, yellow, blue, and green, pure white and black can stand out. When consumers open the freezer to buy drinks, it's hard not to see them.
Even for new consumers seeing Genki Forest for the first time, they immediately add it to their priority purchase list.
-02- Sugar-free health + great taste = redefining new-style healthy beverages
According to public data, China's obese population exceeded 250 million in 2019, and health issues caused by obesity have become a social focus.
Looking closely at street-side milk tea shops, you'll find many brands have introduced half-sugar, 30% sugar, and sugar-free options. On one hand, there's fear of obesity; on the other, a pursuit of health and deliciousness. For young people increasingly concerned about healthy consumption, health-oriented demand has become a new trend in food and beverage development.
Looking at the international market, in 2015, low-calorie, low-sugar bottled water in the US replaced carbonated drinks as the largest category; since the 1990s, Japan's bottled water entered a development period, replacing high-sugar, high-calorie soft drinks.
According to Nielsen data, sugar-free beverages grew at over 30% annually from 2017 to 2018, and people's demand for sugar-free health is increasing day by day.
1. Sugar-free health ≠ bad taste
Sugar-free healthy beverages are not a new concept or species, but in people's minds, sugar-free ≈ bad taste.
From Suntory Oolong Tea launched in 1997 to Uni-President's "Tea King" in 2002, their market performance has been lukewarm.
Since 2011, beverage giants have begun to seize the sugar-free beverage territory. Nongfu Spring launched Oriental Leaf, Master Kong launched Benwei Tea House, Coca-Cola launched Chuncha She, Xiaomi launched Pingze Tea, Wahaha launched Anhua Dark Tea, and C'estbon launched Zuowei Chashi...
But these beverages have not perfectly balanced health and taste; often, those with good taste are not healthy enough, and 0-sugar, 0-fat healthy drinks have poor taste.
Oriental Leaf, the most famous sugar-free beverage, has even been rated as one of the top ten worst-tasting drinks. Why is Suntory Oolong Tea, popular in Japan, difficult to popularize in China? The essential reason is that it's not sweet and has no taste.
2. Leading sweetener addition technology
Genki Forest seems to have found a solution to balance taste and health. "Erythritol" is a sugar-free sweetener that ensures flavor while avoiding excessive calories.
Unlike Coca-Cola's "aspartame," erythritol is a natural sweetener. After drinking, it leaves a slight cool sensation, and the sweetness is very natural.
This makes Genki Forest the current market's sugar-free beverage with the "most natural/sweetest" taste. The truly 0-sugar, 0-fat, 0-calorie health attribute, combined with naturally delicious sweetness, is the key to Genki Forest's success, subtly giving the product a sense of "premium quality."
However, to maintain a leading edge in taste and health, Genki Forest needs to further improve its combination of erythritol, steviol glycosides, and sucralose.
Currently, using only erythritol as a sweetener, its sweetness index is only 0.6 times that of sucrose, far lower than steviol glycosides. This will lead Genki Forest to use large amounts of erythritol to enhance sweetness, increasing production costs to some extent and giving competitors an opportunity.
3. Using sparkling water as the foundation for development
In addition to leading sweetener technology, the beverage category Genki Forest focuses on is also crucial. If Genki Forest had applied its 0-sugar, 0-fat, 0-calorie sweetener technology to old categories like tea drinks, cola, or soda, it might have been difficult to spark consumer interest. But Genki Forest keenly observed the timing for sparkling water development and leveraged its rise.
Sparkling water is relatively mature in Europe and has become a consumption habit in some European countries. In the US, sparkling water has been in a high-growth period since 2010, making it the fastest-growing bottled water subcategory. In Japan, by 2010, 61.2% of consumers had tried sparkling water, mainly among younger groups.
In China, sparkling water has also entered a high-growth period since 2013. Driven by the millennial generation, both sales volume and revenue growth of sparkling water far exceed the overall bottled water industry growth.
But it's worth noting that the industry concentration of sparkling water in China is very low, and domestic sparkling water lacks strong representative brands. At the same time, Genki Forest has put great effort into sparkling water.
Its carbonation level is 1.3 times that of other carbonated drinks, providing strong bubbles and a refreshing taste. The 1.3 times carbonation also makes the fruit flavors in sparkling water fresher and more stimulating, exploding on the palate.
-03- Seize the high ground of channel awareness and expand channels in stages
In an increasingly competitive environment, channels are not just sales platforms; they have become competitive scenes. While being traffic entrances, they are also the cognitive entrances and construction sites for a category or brand.
Choosing the right channel is particularly important for building a brand. If you only treat channels as places to sell goods and don't consider them as competitive environments and communication pathways, you'll end up on all channels, leading to strategic rhythm and awareness-building mistakes, causing a trend crisis.
Reviewing Genki Forest's channel development path, it's clear that its channel breakthrough mainly went through two stages. The first stage was riding the development wave of high-end chain convenience stores to seize the high ground of awareness; the second stage was entering online, supermarkets, and other channels in a rhythmic, staged manner to capture the broader population.
1. Riding the development dividend of chain convenience stores
In the FMCG field, there is a recognized view: the channel dividend of the previous era belonged to large supermarkets, and the biggest beneficiaries were traditional beverage giants that controlled these channels, but now the channel dividend has shifted to chain convenience stores.
1) Seize channel increments
Since 2016, chain convenience stores have entered a period of rapid expansion, with the number of stores growing from 94,000 in 2016 to 122,000 in 2018. The huge channel increment brought massive consumption growth.
Genki Forest noticed this channel trend and chose chain convenience stores in first- and second-tier cities as its market breakthrough, actively entering high-end chains like 7-Eleven, Hema, Bianlifeng, and FamilyMart.
Currently, Genki Forest's offline channels cover 30 provinces, 477 convenience store systems, 53,000 convenience stores, and 130,000 traditional offline stores. It can be said that Genki Forest perfectly rode the convenience store wave.
2) Establish the high ground of awareness
Which group has the most say on trendy new-style beverages? Undoubtedly, young urban white-collar workers. High-end chain convenience stores are mainly located in office districts and community life circles in high-tier cities, and the main customers are urban white-collar workers. The main purchasing group of these channels is highly consistent with Genki Forest's target core group and pricing strategy!
According to FamilyMart consumption data, post-85s and post-90s consumers account for 94% of FamilyMart's total consumers, most of whom are urban white-collar workers.
This consumer group's main characteristics are a focus on health and acceptance of the consumption premium brought by health attributes. A price of 5.5 yuan per bottle is definitely high in supermarkets and mass circulation channels, but it's the norm in high-end chain convenience stores.
From a competitive perspective, Genki Forest's choice of chain convenience stores not only avoids the strongholds of beverage giants but also allows the convenience stores to endow the brand with a high-end, fashionable awareness.
After gaining favor among young urban white-collar workers, Genki Forest occupied the high ground of awareness and began to look down on the mass consumer group.
2. Seize online channels: from being told to engaging in entertainment
Many beverage giants now treat online channels as sales channels, where consumers are merely informed and advertised to, lacking entertainment interaction.
For Genki Forest's founder Tang Binsen, who comes from a gaming background, Genki Forest naturally has the genes for internet communication and interaction. Online channels are undoubtedly an interactive platform to play with young people.
1) Read what they love: Bilibili and variety shows, the two "favorites" of young people
Just as Pepsi once used celebrity endorsements and music festival sponsorships to create a sense of fashion, Genki Forest fully grasps young people's platforms like Bilibili (anime, ACG, and gaming).
Collaborating with Bilibili to launch popular food documentaries and partnering with popular music variety shows not only successfully established consumption scenarios but also interacted with young people. It also embedded itself in popular music variety show IPs.
2) Focus on fan economy and celebrity product promotion
What else do young people like? In the current era of traffic supremacy and fan economy, it's undoubtedly celebrities with the strongest endorsement power and halo effect.
For example, the spokesperson for Ran Tea is often a diligent, hardworking, inspirational idol or star, whose persona aligns perfectly with Genki Forest's sugar-free, healthy, and positive lifestyle positioning. This precise positioning is more easily accepted by young people.
With likes from traffic stars like Fei Qiming, Wang Yibo, Deng Lun, and Huang Jingyu, and cheers from first-line stars like Huang Xiaoming and Jackie Chan, Ran Tea even invited Wei Daxun as its spokesperson! And Genki Forest's most recent spokesperson is the popular sister Zhang Yuqi from "Sisters Who Make Waves," and the halo effect is self-evident.
3) Create social topics and build a social ecosystem for young people
For young people, socializing has become a part of life. Genki Forest, well-versed in this, is not only active on major social media platforms like WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu, but also adept at using each platform's media characteristics to trigger topics with different activities.
Just observing one channel, Xiaohongshu, it's easy to see how much effort Genki Forest puts into new media operations. A search reveals over 6,000 product recommendation articles on Xiaohongshu, far more than other similar products.
The official Weibo account recently launched a fan spokesperson activity, allowing fans to participate in taste tests; there are also recommendations from top KOLs like Li Jiaqi, the king of live streaming. Whoever understands how to interact with young people better will naturally be supported by the younger generation of consumers.
By establishing high-end and fashionable awareness in convenience stores and gaining attention and recommendations from young people online, Genki Forest transformed from a startup brand into a hot internet-famous brand, gaining significant brand momentum in high-end and fashion aspects.
On this basis, it began to enter other channels like supermarkets and mass circulation, capturing the broader consumer population, and evolving from an internet-famous brand to a high-momentum mass consumer brand.
Conclusion:
Strictly speaking, there are many other factors in Genki Forest's success, such as product pricing, which is not entirely based on cost pricing but grasps the user's health attributes and the price vacuum in the same category. Due to space limitations, these are not elaborated here.
When industry insiders see Genki Forest's good market performance, its crisis is just beginning, especially for a brand that has not experienced price wars.
With the entry of multiple FMCG giants, a pursuit has begun with better water quality, lower prices, and stronger channel power. At the same time, the fact that Genki Forest is not an imported beverage but a domestic one is gradually being revealed, causing some early consumers to "turn from fans to passersby."
More frighteningly, Genki Forest's design "borrows" from Japanese brands LUPICIA and Fujiya, which could also be labeled as "copycat," potentially benefiting authentic imported beverages.
(The left, middle, and right images are the packaging designs of LUPICIA, Fujiya, and Genki Forest, respectively)
What the future holds for Genki Forest is unknown to the author. But what can be seen is that the thinking behind building FMCG brands has undergone a series of changes.
In the past, large-scale advertising was the primary communication efficiency; now, product visual packaging and interaction are.
In the past, products were just items for sale; now, from selection to creation, products have become a key element of brand strategy.
In the past, channels mainly focused on distribution breadth, distribution efficiency, and customer relationships; now, channel competition is normalized, requiring consideration of user matching and interactive communication methods, where users' attention is, and what posture and topics you should use to communicate.
In the era of all-factor competition, the number of channels is increasing, and the trends of diversification, three-dimensionality, and all-weather channels are becoming more evident; the number of new media is also increasing, and the ways of interacting and communicating with consumers are changing.
New channels, new media, new technologies, and new concepts—this series of changes has ushered in a new wave of consumption, providing a fertile ground for new consumerism. All traditional industries are worth redoing! But when new consumption opportunities arise, how many entrepreneurs are prepared to embrace change in advance?